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Hi Everyone. This morning, poor Gnome woke up with a terrible crick in his neck. Despite this pain, he soldiered on since the weather was looking good…a bright sunny start and we were ready for a big clean up with brush-mowing and coconut palm cleaning!! All of a sudden, grey clouds gathered and blocked out the sun and we had a down-pour at 8am this morning.
And, so the place is still looking bushy:
Bushy Farm.
Gnome took solace in making some more Pet Sulphur and Lime Dip:
Boiling Sulphur and Lime together.
Gnome really likes the smell of sulphur; he says he feels cleansed and invigorated from the fumes.
We received a re-order for our new pet product which is used to treat mange, fleas, ticks and ringworm:
We have decided to recycle old beer bottles to make the product really cheap and affordable. And, so when we went to the Farm Store in Punta Gorda last week, the manager said to Gnome,
“I’d like to order some more Presidente, please!”
Mr. Brian Cho at The Farm Store.
Despite removing all the tell-tale beer stickers from the bottle, the farm store manager and workers still recognised the Presidente branded beer bottle! This is a picture of Gnome bottling the Sulphur-Lime Dip…now, also known as Presidente!
Anyway, we tried to keep busy. We harvested our lemons and put them through this cool citrus peeler, which the locals usually use for oranges.
Citrus Peeler.
I dry the peel and use it for flavouring of food such as stews, stir frys, soups and of course, limoncello Also, in the process of peeling, we can catch some essential oil from the peel…about 1ml for every 4 lemons and so to get 30mls(1oz) you need 120 lemons in total! Just goes to show the value of a tiny bottle of essential oil…the quantities of biomass never ceases to astound me!
Today has been a day to work on some products. I had already started by extracting chocolate essence from cacao solids a few weeks ago but then the falling apart of the piggie cages necessitated sorting out our furry friends (is everybody sick of hearing about Guinea Pigs yet??) and making essential oil had to be put on hold. However, now that the piggies are sorted we can get back to more serious considerations…
The initial extraction is a post for another time (when I do it again) but it basically involves taking cacao solids (preferably after the cacao butter has been removed from the fermented, roasted beans) with a solvent using an extractor. The result is a dark brown liquid which while plenty aromatic does not qualify as an essential oil, it is more like a tincture. This is what I started with today.
The next step involves the removal of all of the solvent using the apparatus shown below…
Removal of Solvent from the Simple Cacao Extract to Get Chocolate Essential Oil.
The solvent is carried over the apparatus and is collected (not shown) to be re-used for future extractions. The pay dirt is what is left in the flask at the end…for a litre of original extract this takes about twenty-four hours and leaves a very dark brown, thick and syrupy liquid. This product is the essential oil; it is a very, very concentrated broad spectrum natural chocolate flavour and yields what is called an Absolute. As a little aside, essential oils are usually produced by steam distillation while the Absolute is produced by solvent extraction.
